BANGKOK - AgiBot said on July 16 that labour shortages and rising costs are driving robot adoption in Southeast Asian factories and warehouses.
Aimi Komatsu, director of Agibot Innovation (Shanghai) Technology, said regional customers had introduced the company’s robots on production lines and for warehouse sorting. She spoke during the Nikkei Asia Forum APAC 2026 in Bangkok.
“The biggest opportunity today is manufacturing,” Komatsu said. She identified electronics inspection and handling as production-line uses, with sorting and material movement among the applications in logistics and warehousing.
Komatsu said manufacturers across ASEAN were facing labour shortages and higher costs, creating demand for machines that can perform some workplace tasks.
Customers are also becoming more focused on commercial returns. Komatsu said most of her Japanese clients were “asking me about ROI,” rather than focusing on robot demonstrations and entertainment. She described humanoid technology as being at a “kindergarten to primary school stage” of learning to operate in real workplaces.
AgiBot said in a March 30 announcement that it had produced its 10,000th humanoid robot. The company said robots were already working in logistics, services and production lines, with deployments extending to Southeast Asia and other overseas markets. It did not publish a regional total.
The company is also building a base for further expansion in Thailand. AgiBot and GULF Group announced on March 17 that they planned to establish a joint venture covering local data operations, model training and deployment services. Initial pilots include robots for reception and inspections at energy facilities.
More workplace robots will increase demand for people who can install and operate them. “We need more talent engineers,” Komatsu said, particularly “the engineers who can really do the deployment” and make applications work outside laboratories.
Levi Nguyen, CEO of FPT Thailand and FPT Taiwan, also said during the discussion that employers must prepare workers at the same time as they introduce AI.
“We run parallel AI transformation and people transformation,” he said, describing the reskilling of software developers, architects and project managers for AI-related roles.
